In Northport, practically nobody. Several years ago (or just over 2 weeks game time) a band of evil cultists murdered everyone with any type of oracular or divinatory ability in order to cloak their planned summonings and actions.
Among the casualties were the Oracle of Eos, a nymph upon whom one not cast one’s eyes or you would be unable to ask a question, slain by cultists who had put their eyes out just to perform this act of infernal devotion, and the one Sahudese who had a copy of the Classic of Changes. Dozens of divination devices were captured and destroyed, a whole expedition was mounted to reclaim one of them, that involved the slaying of a summoned demon and subsequent sale of its gear.
So who does this leave?
Ludlow has recently acquired a functional pack of tarot cards, and has learned cartomancy, but it has led to Christine Bjorn, a mountain elf fire wizard with a golem (bought with points for cash, not as an ally) heading south to learn Pyromancy from the members of a dragon cult. Christine was one of the earlier PC’s in my game, and had a number of oddball disadvantages, including coitophobia and Evil Twin. The Evil Twin turned out to be a Bard named Marie who left a scattering of blue haired half elves known as the Sons of Marie, who were looking for their mother… Recently one of the two survivors of her massacre of trolls by her, an archer, took out Marie… looks like Christine will need to change Evil Twin to Enemy!
Ulo, the trollwife witch
Rafik the archer
Meanwhile, available now on drivethru are these two collections of stock art:
Fire Ruby Designs just released this beauty on Drivethrurpg. You can get it as a pdf for about $6, and as a hardback for $25.
This game has the most comprehensive collection of my stock art so far -54 separate images of mine, making for a very comprehensive look to the product, and a great portfolio piece for me.
These two goatfolk (or Broo) were drawn for Ryan Thompson for The Hidden Hand of the Horla, which can be got as part of Appendix N’s current kickstarter
I had some fun with the tattoos, which invoke both Baphomet and Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young.
My usual process involves a pencil drawing with two stages of inking with Pilot G-2 Gel pens, using 0.38 and 1.0 sizes, and then scanning at 600 dpi, passing through Photoshop to crop, lighten and contrast until the majority of the pen marks are gone, and then because I never properly learned how to use it, I blow it up in MSPaint and adjust pixel by pixel until I like it.
The problem comes with scanning. I had a good deal on a Canon Pixma 2525, and discovered to my dismay that it likes to search for significant images and crop them out of the main image. It’s algorithms also detest diagonal composition, and try to correct it, as if a small photo had been placed on the scanning bed askew.
This really screws with things, as it can destroy a composition with the arbitrary vertical/horizontal realignment, along with the arbitrary cropping. To correct it from my end, since tech support could not find its ass with both hands and a flashlight, I have to draw heavy frames around the subject. It took about five times to get the goats straightened out, and this is what they looked like by the time I accepted the final scans:
It features art by Peter Mullen, Stefan Poag, and fourteen pieces by me!
I spent the last few months working on these commissions, although a few of the pieces are from my stock art bundles.
The castle itself is a haunted mansion that blends Tegel Manor with the weirdness and doomed romanticism of Edgar Allen Poe, and the films of Jean Cocteau.
Also released at this time (in Hungarian, the English language version is yet to be released) is Shadow of the city God, for which I drew the cover and another illustration. More work by Stefan Poag is in this as well.
I had some fun with the second scene, where some adventurers stumble upon a political cult led by a con artist. Greta is not amused.
Following a Black Friday sale of 80% of all of my gear on Drivethru that netted me my largest payday from OBS (just imagine if that stuff was full price!) I released a bundle of small filler art. I enjoyed the process so much, I may do more of these.
The inspiration comes from a couple of places; Sergio Argonne’s border cartoons in Mad Magazine, medieval manuscript illuminated filler, and these panels of adventurers by David C. Sutherland III from the DMG
To that end, I have included some of my staple characters, the thief from my first Character stock art is here climbing a rope, and the elf and knight stumbling upon the secret door in Dungeon Scenes 1 are now climbing a mountain. I will definitely be building more of these scenes.
A friend of mine released a water based setting for 5e on DM’s Guild called Fathoms Below that I thought was pretty good. It has a nice backstory (Tritons took over a Sahugin fort, and built it into a starfish shaped major trading city, full of intrigue, with an anchored flotilla of rafts directly above, where your air breathers can live, if they are not in some of the domes below. There are some tongue in cheek character backgrounds that pay homage to the Little Mermaid without getting too campy. All too often water based adventures are shunted into auxiliary rules dependent on magic items, and in this case, while there are limits on what surface characters can do, there are a plethora of underwater races (the ones that aren’t new have to be found in other rulebooks, WoTC doesn’t let you quote whole slabs of character abilities), including the usual suspects like sea elves and mermen, along with jellyfish and octopus folk. The variety was surprising, and I recomend the book, along with its supplement .
As usual, when contemplating GURPSifying races from other games, the huge cost of things like Amphibious, Extra Limbs and Flexible make things like half octopus characters dreadfully expensive, but that is one of the things I like about point buy systems; it costs more to be exotic and powerful up front, rather than using level limits or added XP cost – neither of those methods address starting level character balance, and adding a racial template of assorted boni to a fully fleshed out class template results in a more costly one; building the racial template into the class template (by 86ing other advantage options) results in a character who might be less than starting equivalent for others of their template -DF’s 250 point base builds characters with a rough equivalence to 5th-8th level AD&D characters, and dropping in a 25 point racial template makes you almost a level lower. Most of the PC races are in the 20 point range, but some (mostly those infused with the supernatural) cost 75 points, making them relatively weaker when compared to characters built as human.
When I was creating artwork for my Undead Stock Art Bundle, I illustrated the above nasty, which I was sure John Stater had included in an issue of his excellent zine Nod..,and it turns out it was from the very first issue, currently available from Lulu.com (use the codes ONEFIVE for 15% off and ONESHIP for free shipping).
With his permission, the creatures (one of many listings in that book):
Headless Screamer
Headless screamers arise from the corpses of the beheaded. They are cruel and chaotic beings who delight in tormenting the living. Headless screamers look something like zombies with a noticeable red slash across its neck. They can throw their heads with alarming accuracy, and in fact do not need to throw their own head, for the headless screamer’s intelligence and animating force are in the body. Many of these creatures keep four or five heads handy. Thrown heads have a range increment of 20’. The thrown head will snap its jaws, dealing 1d8 points of damage to anyone hit and then latching on if the target fails a saving throw. A latched head inflicts 1d4 points of bite damage each round until removed. Headless screamers can telekinetically retrieve these heads and still move or attack each round. Headless screamers can also emit a shrill shriek from the air hole in their necks. Anyone hearing this must succeed at a saving throw or suffer a ‐1 penalty to hit, damage and save for 1 hour.
Headless Screamer: HD 4; AC 3 [16]; Atk 1 claw (1d6) or 1 thrown
head (1d8); Move 15; Save 13; CL/XP 7/600; Special: Throw and
retrieve head, scream, immune to cold.
I GURPSified this as follows:
Headless Screamers (DF)
ST: 14 HP: 18 Speed: 5.00
DX: 9 Will: 8 Move: 4
IQ: 8 PER: 9
HT: 12 FP: 12 SM: 0
Dodge: 8 Parry: 9 (Unarmed) DR: 0
Throw Head (14): 1d crushing plus follow-up bite for 1d crushing
Bite/Punch (12): 1d crushing.
Sickle:12 damage 1d+1 cutting, used against throat when harvesting a new head.
Scream: affects all hearing as Fear spell
Traits: Bad Smell; Bloodlust, Cannot Learn; Darkvision, Doesn’t Breathe;Doesn’t Sleep; Fragile (Unnatural); High Pain Threshold; Immunity(All mind control); Immunity to Metabolic Hazards; Intolerance: Living; Indomitable; Injury Resistance 1(cold); Injury Tolerance (No Blood, No Head, Unliving); Returning weapon (head: costs 1 FP); Sadism, Temperature Tolerance 10 (-115° to 60°); Unfazeable; Unhealing (Total). Affected by pentagram, True Faith, and spells that affect evil
Skills: Brawling-12; Wrestling-12 (+2 ST when grappling) Sickle (knife)-12 Throwing-14.
Class: Undead.
Notes: Headless Screamers are truly evil, and cannot be negotiated with. They appear as normal zombies with obvious throat wounds. They can see even without heads, and usually keep 4-5 heads handy for throwing or wearing; Heads have range 7/14, and can return telekinetically to their hand.
Another creature I recently illustrated, as seen above, is the Meowl. Stats for Basic era games can be found in Timothy Brannon‘s new tongue-in-cheek book on witches.
GURPS DF stats are as follows (a blend of the Owl and Cat familiars from DF 5-Allies):
Luck (GBF, -40%)[9]Night Vision 3 (GBF, -40%) [2], 5 [3], or 8 [5], or Dark Vision
(GBF, -40%) [15] and Silence 1 (GBF, -40%) [3] or 2 [6].
Those who buy Flight can also add Enhanced Move (Air; GBF,
-40%) [12/level], but only to reduce deceleration.
At some point I have to write up my view of witches for DF. In the meantime, I have finished up some illustrations for Gabor Lux, hopefully Castle Xyntillan will be on sale in time for the Holidays; at the moment it is in the proof stage.
Just released this week ( and in time for Halloween) is my latest bundle of stock art : Undead available from DrivethruRPG for $4.99.
I have been doing a lot of work these past months for Gabor Lux’ Echoes from Fomalhaut, and in particular for his upcoming Tegel Manor inspired megadungeon, Castle Xyntillan, and the still-in-development In the Shadow of the City God
Two of his most recent items, The Nocturnal Table currently available as a pdf from Drivethrurpg and featuring work by Mathew Ray, Stefan Poag, and Peter Mullen as well as myself, along with EFF#6: The Rising Tombs which has art by myself and Stefan Poag also, both are suited for describing convoluted weird cities at night. As my own game takes place in such a place, I found this rather interesting. The random encounters in the Nocturnal Table go way beyond the old DMG city encounter tables, and into some very strange places. Otherwise boring encounters with nameless NPc’s are richly described run ins with peculiar named personages, each with a distince flavor. There has been a lot said about demonstrating an implied setting by examining the encounter tables instead of dropping in extensive exposition, for example, regarding OD&D. The Rising Tombs does this with minimal descriptions and small notes, and leaves the reader to connect the dots. In one part of the city, in a sealed community where the swells reside, it is always night with a perpetual full moon. This is atmospheric, but there are some supporting features; The city is ruled by a powerful illusionist, and also the rich folks are near immortal and addicted to potions of longevity… or they may be vampires. The under layers of the city evoke a bit of the depths of Dwimmermount, without dumping pages of history up front. There are, by way of anticipating adventurers who want to burn down the tavern, mentions of an enormous machine that extends into the depths, that might explode like a megaton warhead if tampered with, and the side note that one must wear “sacred vestments” (radiation suits) to safely enter the lower levels of a dungeon. Not only are the routes to this area from a cheap hotel that H.H.Holmes might have built, or through the green room of a collapsing Theater haunted by a phantom… or through a temple of a rat/plague god. These are not your typical entry by sewer dungeons, and definitely not like either my or Hasbro’staverns with conduits to the underworld. Gabor Lux, (known on forae as Melan), for all his resentment against the Sworddream style of OSR derived play, is firmly in touch with the parts of our hobby that are gonzo and rooted in Weird fiction. It is no secret that I like that style of gaming, as I grew up reading my dad’s virtually complete Appendix N library (assembled as it was printed, in crumbling 35 cent paperbacks, most of which I have been reacquiring from used booksellers), and while a good amount of both Gabor’s and John Stater‘s products are procedurally generated, they go into some far out places that I am happy to illustrate. That headless undead in my stock art bundle is based on one of the encounters in Nod zine, although I forget what issue. I own copies of about eight issues I did illustrations for, but there are 26 other issues of the same grade of super detailed and strange hexcrawls.
Meanwhile, in my game, there have been some odd developments.
The group travelling with the demon hunting celestial Kalima have decided to try and summon her back to the world after a demonologist they were fighting banished her with a hurled Spellstone. I was thoroughly expecting that they would be glad to be rid of such a DM PC, but no plan escapes an encounter with players unscathed. They are enlisting the leader of a Kali cult named Molaram to help in the summoning…
My Wuxia group has traveled into the megafauna rich land of Veroigne, nominally to collect a rice harvest for the Sahudese population back in Northport, and have encountered the odd ecosystem of the rice grower’s village. Swarms of stirges rise out of the rice paddies, but are chased away from the workers by a sacred giant dragonfly, from whom the party received a blessing, much the way the other group in the area had their ranger blessed by the Stag of Veroigne, who was somewhere between the Forrest Spirit of Princess Mononoke, and Bambi’s father. Both groups have seen tracks of giant rabits being stalked by dire wolves.
The group that were hired to hunt a rampaging beast have instead decided to try and take over an abandoned castle, which brings me around to an issue developing around my Juniors group. They have been trying to establish themselves with real property (excepting those among them who have Social Stigma:Criminal, who cannot directly own real property in Northport) and I have been using the Base Perk as a leveled one. Base normally gives you a place that you don’t have to pay rent that is about as good as what you might have, but with a status level of 2 levels lower than your own. At status 0, that is not much to talk about, in this case, a peasant’s hovel or tenement row house in disrepair. I suppose in other settings it would be a back booth in a diner or a leaky basement apartment. Making it a leveled perk lets you raise it by one status level per point invested, which means that at 3 points, it is a clean, functional status 0 home. This group of PC’s are trying to control the housing above an entrance to the dungeon and in particular, to a magical gate. I had originally had them invest in independent income, but that was only netting half a silver a month per point at average wealth, so I converted those points to base. The Initiate in the group has been attracting followers (not yet bought as allies) who have been doing things like basic carpentry, weeding, whitewashing…etc, that have resulted in the area being upgraded. A lot of the things I have been thinking of here were sort of echoed in Necropraxis’ blog about Stronghold Achievements for low level characters.
I miss things like the Mansion advantage from GURPS VtM, and the leveled advantage Sanctuary, from the defunct Advanced Goblins & Grottoes setting from Otherwhere dot org, (sadly even beyond the reach of the internet wayback machine). That one let you build anything from the Batcave (large, secret, secure) to something like the airships of Girl Genius.
Castle Xyntillan, which will be a hardback megadungeon after the style of Tegel Manor and features not only my art, but that of Peter Mullen, and Stefan Poag.
Additionally, I have finally released my latest stock art bundle, Faerie Creatures
I have been toiling away at some interesting commissions for my primary patron, Gabor Lux and here are some of the recent items I have done:
Additionally, I have been getting some of my recent kickstarter rewards:
I bought two copies of the Far Away Land OSR core rules. (not yet on sale, but awesome)
Far Away Land is a wonderful game and setting that has really endearing illustrations by Dirk Stanley that make me think of the best parts of Adventure Time. It is terribly fun, and I will go on about it at length in a later post, where I may attempt to do some conversions.
I was mentioned in a podcast about GURPS homebrew settings!
Gabor Lux has just released his hardcover megadungeon 
To that end, I have included some of my staple characters, the thief from my first Character stock art is here climbing a rope, and the elf and knight stumbling upon the secret door in Dungeon Scenes 1 are now climbing a mountain. I will definitely be building more of these scenes.
Northport 